Musician and activist Bono accepts the 2005 TED Prize with a riveting talk, arguing that aid to Africa isn't just another celebrity cause; it's a global emergency.

As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TED Prize, he makes a plea on behalf of all creatures that we learn more about our biosphere -- and build a networked encyclopedia of all the world's knowledge about life.

Speaking at TED in 1998, Rev. Billy Graham marvels at technology's power to improve lives and change the world -- but says the end of evil, suffering and death will come only after the world accepts Christ. A legendary talk from TED's archives.

Physicist Lee Smolin talks about how the scientific community works: as he puts it, "we fight and argue as hard as we can," but everyone accepts that the next generation of scientists will decide who's right. And, he says, that's how democracy works, too.

It’s a question on so many minds: what will the future of education look like? It’s something Sir Ken Robinson has asked for decades. And tonight in Session 3 of TED2013, Robinson got the opportunity to announce the winner of the 2013 TED Prize, someone who has a bold answer. “So many kids are disengaged from education and there’s a t...

Each year, the TED Prize is awarded to an extraordinary individual with a creative and bold vision to spark global change. Think JR’s global participatory art project, Inside Out, or Sugata Mitra’s School in the Cloud. By leveraging the TED community’s resources to support the winner and investing $1 million in their idea, the TED Prize insp...

Gerard Senehi is a performer of tiny miracles or, if you're looking for a more formal job title, a mentalist. A mentalist is someone who blows people's minds by doing things that just can't be explained through science or reason and Gerard is exactly that. Be it his hands-off approach to smoking a cigarette, his ability to mostly read your m...

About this event: Is there some success in failure? Pablo Foncillas says Yes. According to him, we are too much focused on success and do not accept failure. Looking only at success and not reflecting about the mistakes we have done can kill innovation. Thus, we need urgently a culture which accepts success as well as failure and sees failure as part of the creat...

Last night at SXSW, William and the Windmill was awarded one of the festival’s top two honors, taking home Grand Jury Award for Documentary Feature. The film tells the story of TED Speaker William Kamkwamba, who has come to be known by the title of his memoir, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. At age 14, Kamkwamba built a windmill out of junk par...

When he set out to create a photo essay on “poverty in America” in 2005, photographer Aaron Huey had no idea what was in store for him. What started as one story soon consumed his life as he became a committed activist devoted to raising awareness about Native American treaty rights. Just last month, he launched Honor the Treaties, a national ca...

“Movies have proved to be the ultimate medium for magic,” says Don Levy in today’s talk. A member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and former senior vice president of marketing and communications at Sony Pictures, Levy has always been fascinated by the sleights of hand that filmmakers use to create illusions. And he knows he i...

This morning, we're thrilled to present a TEDTalk as you have never seen a TEDTalk before -- with a clickable layer of information that anyone can add to, edit or remix. Working on Beau Lotto and Amy O'Toole's new TEDTalk, the team at Mozilla used their new web-based video editing / annotating tool, Popcorn Maker. Today's TED Talk from Ryan M...

We each live in the shadow of a personal apocalypse: the knowledge that -- someday, somehow -- we will die. It's a terrifying thought, and so we look for a way out. In my talk from TEDxBratislava (and in my book Immortality), I walk through four stories that people have told throughout cultures and time, as a way to manage this very real fea...

Momentum is great. But how do you sustain it? This session will examine what it takes to keep on keeping on, from speakers who are just starting out and those who've been at it for decades. Short recaps of the talks in this session... The number one abuse of human rights. Former president Jimmy Carter begins with jokes (looking out at ...

How should we start to tackle the Zika virus? MIT's José Gómez-Márquez and Lee Gehrke share their bright idea. Not enough is known about the Zika virus, but with links to brain inflammation and microcephaly, it’s clear that it has devastating effects -- and it isn’t going away any time soon. And there’s another issue: The medical community isn’...

If Bill Nye, Jackson Pollock and Rube Goldberg ever had a hack week, the end project might resemble "Nature’s Drawings," a project from scientist/artist Fabian Oefner. Whether he’s capturing the rainbow colors of a film of oil in spectacular detail or catching oddly shaped iridescent soap bubbles just as they’re about to pop, Fabian Oefner has ...

Inviting speakers to give a talk at your event takes more work (and finesse) than you might think. You should know how to craft a great invitation, and the information your prospective speakers need to know.

Lawyer and activist Nighat Dad talks about the fight to create a more accessible internet for women and other marginalized groups in her home country of Pakistan. There had never been a woman like Qandeel Baloch in Pakistan. In 2013, when she was 23 years old, her dramatic audition on Pakistan Idol went viral, and in the years that followed, sh...

Swami Dayananda Saraswati unravels the parallel paths of personal development and attaining true compassion. He walks us through each step of self-realization, from helpless infancy to the fearless act of caring for others.

Architect Kate Orff sees the oyster as an agent of urban change. Bundled into beds and sunk into city rivers, oysters slurp up pollution and make legendarily dirty waters clean -- thus driving even more innovation in "oyster-tecture." Orff shares her vision for an urban landscape that links nature and humanity for mutual benefit.

What's the key to using alternative energy, like solar and wind? Storage -- so we can have power on tap even when the sun's not out and the wind's not blowing. In this accessible, inspiring talk, Donald Sadoway takes to the blackboard to show us the future of large-scale batteries that store renewable energy. As he says: "We need to think about ...

Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action -- and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group.

What do you call a veterinarian who can only take care of one species? A physician. In a fascinating talk, Barbara Natterson-Horowitz shares how a species-spanning approach to health can improve medical care of the human animal -- particularly when it comes to mental health.

Philosopher Stephen Cave begins with a dark but compelling question: When did you first realize you were going to die? And even more interesting: Why do we humans so often resist the inevitability of death? Cave explores four narratives -- common across civilizations -- that we tell ourselves "in order to help us manage the terror of death."

How much energy and brain power do we devote to learning how to spell? Language evolves over time, and with it the way we spell -- is it worth it to spend so much time memorizing rules that are filled with endless exceptions? Literary scholar Karina Galperin suggests that it may be time for an update in the way we think about and record language...

In our hyperlinked world, we can know anything, anytime. And this mass enlightenment, says Buddhist scholar Bob Thurman, is our first step toward Buddha nature.

Physicist Freeman Dyson suggests that we start looking for life on the moons of Jupiter and out past Neptune, in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud. He talks about what such life would be like -- and how we might find it.

Philosopher John Searle lays out the case for studying human consciousness -- and systematically shoots down some of the common objections to taking it seriously. As we learn more about the brain processes that cause awareness, accepting that consciousness is a biological phenomenon is an important first step. And no, he says, consciousness is n...

As the child of an Afghan mother and Pakistani father raised in Norway, Deeyah Khan knows what it's like to be a young person stuck between your community and your country. In this powerful, emotional talk, the filmmaker unearths the rejection and isolation felt by many Muslim kids growing up in the West -- and the deadly consequences of not emb...

With his signature resolve, former US President Jimmy Carter dives into three unexpected reasons why the mistreatment of women and girls continues in so many manifestations in so many parts of the world, both developed and developing. The final reason he gives? "In general, men don't give a damn."